Get up, Dress up, Show up

The full quote actually goes like this…

“No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, show up and never give up“.

It’s good isn’t it? Just reading it makes me sit up a little taller, straighten my clothes and stick my chin out defiantly. Defiant’s a good word for it too. That’s the feeling I get when I think about this quote.

We all have days when life feels like a bit of a struggle. Or days where we know we’ve got something to do or face or deal with that we really really don’t want to do or face or deal with.

And we could choose to hibernate (let’s face it, we’ve got the perfect weather for it right now – cold, wet and miserable). No-one would judge us. Even if they did judge us, we wouldn’t know – we’d be in our warm cosy beds, hibernating. But then, eventually, at some point in the future, we’d have to kick off the covers, get out of bed, and face the thing we didn’t want to face. And quite possibly, having left it to fester, the thing would have gotten more smelly, more sticky and even more horrible to deal with. And we’d still be there, in the future, having to deal with it. So the hibernating would have done us no good, and could quite possibly have made things much worse.

Instead, if we took the quote to heart, here’s how it might go, at some slightly earlier point in the future.

We’d wake up and realise we have something difficult ahead of us. We might feel anxious about that. But then we’d remember our quote. So we’d go ahead and read our quote and then we’d get defiant. We’d think ‘No. You slightly whiffy thing, you will not defeat me.’ And thinking that would make us feel a little bit better. And because we’d feel a bit better, we might actually get up and out of bed. We might even dress up in clothes that make us feel extra awesome. Then dressed in our magic awesome clothes, with our magic awesome words still ringing in our already awesome brains, we’d show up to where the slightly whiffy thing was (because it hadn’t yet had time to get really smelly and sticky and horrible). And we’d look at it and we’d think ‘Oh. Well. You’re a bit of a let down aren’t you. You’re a little bit whiffy, but I have a nose peg. And you’re a little bit sticky but I have gloves. And you are a little bit annoying to deal with but I am defiant. Very defiant.’ And then we’d defiantly and deftly deal with the thing.

Because we don’t give up. We get up, we dress up and we show up. That’s how we roll.